Historians have long debated the relationship between the Cynics and early Christianity. There are some striking similarities to be found in the lives of the Cynics who emerged in the context of Classical Greece, a few hundred years before Christ - so much so, that some believe Christ may have been influenced by them.
The likeness is superficial. The Cynics rested their thought on a different epistemological basis and their ethics were also different - and yet similar enough at times to generate a lot of discussion. For those wishing to make direct comparisons or find some trace of lineage, it's a dead end. That said, the similarities can be striking and nevertheless generate some interesting reflection. The Cynics raise issues in terms of ethics and society that the Church can benefit from. And this is not something new or something that emerged in this era of comparative religious studies.
The Early Church battled over the Cynics with some commentators admiring them and others expressing contempt. As early Christian thinkers wrestled with their context and the intellectual milieu they inhabited, they were compelled to address the various philosophical systems in play, offering commentary and critique. The necessary denunciation of the Epicureans and others was obvious. The Cynics were a bit of a puzzle.
The seminal figure is of course Diogenes of Sinope who lived in a barrel-like jar and walked about during the day with a lantern in hand, searching for an honest man. He is a both a fascinating and frustrating figure - and for most an enigma. In many respects the Cynics are part-street people, part-counter-cultural hippies, and yet something more as well. In modern Western society, most of them would probably end up institutionalised, and yet significant sections of the Early Church esteemed them - at least to a point.
It's a testimony to how far removed today's bourgeois Christianity is from the ethos of the early centuries. Some (particularly in the Dominionist factions) admit this and their contempt and scorn for the Early Church is palpable. In contrast to this, there are some within Eastern Orthodoxy that not only esteem the ethics and ethos of the Early Church but see a parallel with the kind of behaviour exhibited by the Cynics and some of the early Christians, especially among the ascetic figures of late antiquity. Eastern Orthodoxy also has within their tradition the 'holy fool'-type figures - seeming madmen who are eccentric, extreme, and yet revered as living prophets.
Though today's Church largely despises the notion of poverty, it was esteemed throughout much of Church history as was the austerity exhibited by the Cynics. After the Medieval Church embraced wealth and power, dissent often came in the form of poverty - the Poor of Lyons, the Poor Lombards, the poor preachers of Lollardy and the reaction to these groups in the mendicant orders. The Franciscans would divide over poverty with some groups becoming so extreme they were deemed heretics and burned. Others have pointed to the parallels with Cynicism in terms of cosmopolitanism and nonconformity. The analogy collapses when one considers the 'shameless' and nature-based dog/animal ethic of the Cynics, quite at odds with the New Testament.
The Cynics erred in supposing that nature could provide an ethical norm though they were right (in a sense) in assuming that society was at odds with nature and this was the source of the world's grief. This question of nature is at the centre of many Christian debates in our time as there has been a shift away from the emphasis on fallen nature - though of course there are no contemporary Christian voices advocating for the Cynic's specific interpretation of the 'natural' life - though there are many Christians who seem captivated by what they deem to be 'natural' in terms of health and diet. This is usually wed to other narratives regarding industrialisation, the state, the American Civil War, Southern Agrarianism, and the like.
In contrast to the Cynics, the Scriptures treat nature as fallen, corrupted, and dominated by death. It is certainly no sure guide in the post-Edenic age. That said, there are still remnants of God's stamp on nature and this is beyond its transcendence and beauty. There is still the conscience and an understanding of basic moral and ethical norms that even the fallen can discern - if for the wrong reasons and to the wrong ends. The Cynics certainly sensed that the way man lives and the civilizations he builds are wrong. They offered an interesting critique but their answers fell fall short.
The Cynics rightly understood that personal freedom should be wed to self-discipline and they extended this to self-sufficiency. It's both similar and different from a Christian understanding. Freedom is neither the rights-empowered individualism that emerged with the Enlightenment (the American ideal), nor the libertine abandon assumed by some - which is frequently wed to economic theory. Freedom for the Christian is the ability to break with the bondage of sin and pursue righteousness. The Cynics came to a similar understanding apart from Biblical concepts of anthropology and soteriology. By forming an epistemology and ethic (functionally a religion) on the basis of nature, they fall into the very idolatry condemned by the apostle in the opening salvos of his epistle to the Romans. One might argue the various permutations of Dominionism which also seeks to pattern the Christian life and conduct on the patterns and assumptions of nature (as previously mentioned) falls into this same idolatrous trap and for some the accusation can certainly be made of a tendency toward pantheism. A different road perhaps, but one that ends up in the same place - far removed from Zion.
Interestingly, the Cynics decried the anthropomorphic representations of the gods and by some estimations the idea of polytheism - notions that lend themselves to one of their most famous defections - that of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, a school that tended toward an impersonal and pantheist view of God and thus again at odds with classical polytheist notions. Others (and I think in particular contemporary scholars) like to reckon them as atheists, though I'm not sure why because I can't imagine these contemporary godless thinkers really identifying with them.
The Cynics and in particular Diogenes were famous for 'Defacing the Coin'. For Diogenes this may in fact have involved coin clipping at some earlier stage in his life - the act reckoned a crime because it devalued currency.
But the expression can have a larger meaning in terms of a kind of witness against the order, an act of protest, subversion, condemnation, and moral contempt.
The New Testament presents an image of the Church at odds with the world, living as pilgrims, disentangled from the affairs of this life, seeking an eschatological Kingdom that is not of this world, but also one that promises the doom and condemnation of this present evil age and the powers (both terrestrial and celestial) which rule over it.
We are not to deface the coin in the sense of fomenting rebellion and strife, or in acts of deliberate subversion (as we see with today's Dominionists). We are in fact to pay taxes and even suffer ourselves to be defrauded and our goods spoiled. But we do deface the coin in the sense of contempt for the wealth of the world and what it represents, offers, and seeks to tempt us with. We devalue it and are not tempted by its lustre. Again, this is at odds with the contemporary Church which eagerly takes Satan's offer made to Christ in the temptation of the wilderness - they cut a Faustian bargain in order to access power and possess the world's treasures. And they lose their souls as a result. We are watching this happen right before our eyes.
Defacing the coin is to spit on this offer and reject all that it stands for - understanding that which the world esteems is abomination in the sight of God and that friendship with the world is enmity with God. It is subversion, but only in a symbolic sense or we might say in Christian terms it is an expression of kerygma-proclamation. And part of this task is to (like the Cynics) call out and expose both inconsistency in thought and hypocrisy in act. And we do see this kind of ethic at work in the lives of Christ and His apostles.
One might also say that in opposition to an 'end justifies the means' kind of mindset that dominates all those who take up the sword and coin mindset (which also belongs to politics) the Cynics (like Biblical Christianity) understood that the road or pathway to truth is just as important as the end or goal. Unlike the Cynics, the means (or way of life) is not the end in itself, but a testimony regarding the eschatological nature of the end we seek - come what may in this life.
The Cynics also possessed what might be called a pilgrim ethic as their garb of rough cloak and staff did testify, but it was a nihilist hope at best. Some might appreciate this integrity in terms of thought and action for without Christ, nihilism is the only honest option, but one so dark that most reject it and prefer to live in Matrix-like fantasy. All philosophies ultimately fail and despite their valiant attempts to proclaim otherwise, the Cynics arrive at the same dead end. But it's almost as if they acknowledge this and then try to respond with a way of life that has no hope but seeks integrity and the limited peace that might be hoped for in this world without hope of redemption.
For this reason, it might be argued they are deserving of empathy and pity as opposed to scorn. They reject what some call 'high theory' and like the sceptics were unimpressed by abstract argumentation, speculation, and attempts to build intellectual systems. That said, they still constituted a philosophical school of sorts and some Christian authors would utilize Paul's arguments in 1 Corinthians to condemn them and some Catholic authors would associate them with heresy and the various heretical sects of the Middle Ages, such as the Cathars. Again, there are similarities - just as there are with the Waldenses, Spiritual Franciscans, and even the Early Church, but they are superficial.
Their vagrancy was a living out of what Christians could call a pilgrim ethic. While we don't normally associate that mindset with actual vagabondage, it does say a great deal about societal values and what we might call social conventions, propriety, or middle class norms. This lifestyle and mindset (also exhibited by Christ and the apostles) represents a complete rejection of these bourgeois values - which ironically so many Christians have embraced and all but baptised. Defacing the Coin came to mean challenging and tearing down the pillars upon which society is built - a task Christians should embrace but not on a political level. We proclaim the coming doom, expose the rotten foundations, reveal that the world's gold is in fact tarnished, temporal, and thus counterfeit. We reject Babylon but submitting to Providence and God's longsuffering, we do not seek to overthrow it. In this present evil age, entities like Babylon and Rome serve their purpose but they are doomed and cannot be Christianised or appropriated by the Church. They cannot be transformed into the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who attempt to do so create counterfeits at best, dangerous pseudo-Zions that lead people into apostasy.
As wealth is tied to power, the Cynics and the Early Christians were suspicious of riches and the rich. The New Testament is replete with condemnations of the rich - the Old Testament condemns not just the avarice of the nations but the way the rich functioned within the context of the covenant community - exploiting fellow believers, living as though God didn't see their deeds, as though God does not exist. This is why one cannot serve God and Mammon, they are incompatible. Needless to say it's not a message today's Church will even consider. They rage against it, all the more as wealth is critical to their misguided pursuit of power.
The interchange between Diogenes and Alexander is a famous episode in the Cynic narrative that further testifies to this - an episode that is mildly reminiscent of the temptation/power dynamics in the Temptation in the Wilderness, though it would be a mistake to downplay the cosmic nature of the gospel episode and reckon it as mundane - as if that were possible when conversing with Satan. The lesson is also ethical and practical and again, one the Church has ignored and rejected.
The Cynics were sceptical of merchants, believing their method of income to be suspect and akin to cheating. Interestingly the many poverty-oriented dissenting groups throughout the Middle Ages (and even after the Magisterial Reformation's re-affirmation of sacralism) embraced the same thinking. And in every case, once these groups (like the Early Church) changed their views on money, they underwent a fundamental change and in many cases all but lost their unique identity.
Like the later monks, the Cynics were accused of vanity, exhibitionism, and arrogance, but in reality they treated their reputations as being of no account - the true otherworldly mindset of a pilgrim. How remarkable that they pursued this course apart from the hope Christians possess. Some medieval thinkers would compare the Cynics to the more extreme Franciscans.
It can be argued that with the Renaissance, the era of Cynic appreciation within the Church came to an end. The Renaissance was captivated with rediscovered knowledge and its application to culture and society. They had no time for the jaded Cynics - though in short order Pyrrhonism (or Scepticism) would reappear - ironically at first with the Counter-Reformation and figures like Montaigne, and later Protestant thinkers like Bayle. But Cynicism does not appear again unless one wants to make the tenuous and tangential connection with later Nihilism or perhaps the hippy culture of nonconformity in the 1960's. The true hippy types (not to be confused with the marching and protesting activists of the era) were certainly critical of social values and lived lives of nonconformity, but seemed far less principled and in many cases were a product of decadence rather than genuine conviction. How long that ethos even lasted is debatable. And certainly the so-called Jesus People who came out of the 1960's and in the 1970's would enter the ranks of Evangelicalism were quick to leave any hint of that ethos behind. Sure, they linked to sing around the campfire and spend time on nature retreats, but by the 1980's they had embraced the values of the middle class and would slowly but surely be pulled into politics and culture war - and thus the abandonment of any kind of 'hippy' ethic they once had entertained. The struggles and tensions was the stuff of 1980's television shows.
Do they Cynics provide a 'lesson' for the Church? That's hard to say. But they are interesting and profitable in that they stimulate some questions, discussion, and reflection. There's little about them that will resonate with today's Western Christians and increasingly Evangelicals in the Developing World are looking more to the likes of Elon Musk and Tim Keller than Francis of Assisi, Maximus of Constantinople, or Peter Chelčický.
The Cynics are (like all philosophical schools) a dead end and yet their appreciation by segments of the Church throughout history is worth revisiting and consideration. It tells us something about how thinking and values have shifted - and I don't think for the better.